Asklemmy

I totally agree. Worrying, as an action, is useless. Worry as a feeling, an emotional signal, is useful.

Worry is like a messenger from your subconscious. It’s a signal there’s a gap between your opportunity and your action. As soon as you see the worry, you can turn it off by getting back in line with your conscience.

Worry is part of “the wisdom to know the difference”. It indicates you haven’t yet determined which of those two it is: a thing you can change, or a thing you can’t.

So worrying is useless, in the same way sitting there listening to an alarm bell is useless. The alarm is a useful signal. Indulging in it is not.

Shut off the alarm and address the problem. In this case the problem is not “something I value is gonna get hurt”. It’s “something I value is gonna get hurt, and I don’t yet know whether I should be doing something about it or not”.

The best way out the is:

worry -> map out the problem -> [branch] (help how you can OR accept it)

You can pluck the worry out of your mind if you’re a skillful meditator. Just kill it like a computer process. But it will come up again until you remove its root, which is vagueness about the line between “the courage to change things I can” and “the serenity to accept yhe things I cannot”.

So, like I said, worry is a component of “the wisdom to know the difference”. It is that wisdom’s triggering mechanism.

In my opinion, at least.

Intelligence is the ability to understand and predict things.

Wisdom is the tendency to make decisions that turn out well.

I figure by that definition knowledge, conditioned responses, muscle memory, perspective, commitment to certain values, beliefs, it’s all part of wisdom.

Generally, by the existence of malice’s ability to understand and then use Hanlon’s Razor to provide itself cover.

Knowing the enemy’s heuristics allows you to deceive and manipulate them. Hence, heuristics themselves come with a cost during war.

Then the problem is: are we at war or not? Malice thinks we are. Incompetence maybe not.

Round and round we go. Which could be our own incompetence, or malice’s plan all along. Fuck.

Unfortunately, a lot of smart people still have this problem. I'd say I'm pretty damn well rounded and all that's taught me is how easy it is to find a subject that I don't know that's still very important. Meanwhile, you can hardly throw a rock without finding an engineer that thinks he should rule the world.

Alan Watts is so fun. He used words like that monk lady in the marvel movies that slaps people out of their bodies.

He’s masterful with words. So masterful he makes it look easy.

So many teachers like “beyond this point words fail”, and they’ve got a good point, but Watts goes “let me give it a shot” and then conveys things in words that can take years to grasp through the brute force method of direct perception.

People shit on words, and with very good reason, but they are the chutes and ladders that make enlightenment in a single lifetime possible if one’s lucky enough to have a teacher like Watts.

You practising stoicism?

Funny. "Fear keeps you alive" is one I use fairly often.

No wonder psychiatrists are called shrinks.

Fear is the mind-killer

I am typically this when someone accuses me of being a hypocrite. Either way, I certainly do tolerate it though, in fact I have a system for it.

That works both ways though. Even the fable where the quote originated had that as a takeaway.